Time Immortal

I love tripping over the blogs of converts to the Church, and Et tu? is certainly a joyous find in that regard. In particular, I was rather struck by this post, which remarks on something very compelling indeed — the notion that we “are” a certain individual, which we can deviate from and return to.

It reminded me of something that used to give me pause when I was an atheist.

For quite a few years in my late teens and early 20’s, I struggled with depression. It was clear to me that there was some kind of chemical imbalance going on in my brain, and it permeated every aspect of my life and thoughts. I would sometimes lament the fact that I just wasn’t “myself” anymore…yet I was never comfortable with that idea. In my worldview, the human person was nothing more than a collection of molecules; selfhood was nothing more than a unique set of chemical reactions firing in the brain. In that case, how could the current set of chemical reactions be less “me” than the chemical reactions that were going on a few years before?

I tried to explain this sense of a lost self by looking at the idea that the “self” is some sort of baseline set of chemical reactions, the most typical pattern of interaction among the neurons over the course of a person’s life. Yet, since I was dealing with depression at an early age and my brain had been rapidly growing and changing since childhood, it was hard to imagine that the “happy” interactions of the chemicals when I was 15 were somehow more authentically me than these “depressed” chemical interactions I’d been experiencing for 100% of my life as a matured adult.

Eventually things changed, and the depression lifted. I was grateful and relieved to finally be myself again. And yet, this “selfhood” that I had “recovered” clearly had a rather different set of chemical reactions and patterns of behavior than the version of me the last time I’d felt like myself, when I was a young teenager. How could this be? I knew that it defied logic to claim that the new set of reactions that I’d experienced for only a fraction of my adult life was more “me” than the ones I’d experienced the rest of my post-childhood years. Yet somewhere inside I knew it was true.

Years later, this was one of the things that led me to truly open my mind to possibility that there might be something more to life than the material world at hand. The undeniable truth of the existence of one objectively authentic version of myself, an encompassing essence that was intertwined with yet something different than the chemical reactions in my brain, piqued my interest in exploring the spiritual disciplines.

In other words, I started to think that I just might have a soul.

God does not see fit to shout out his presence at us, and this is probably for the best as I am sure that none could withstand even the merest whisper from the Almighty. In general, the Lord seems to prefer to work in subtle ways, although every so often He steps outside of that framework but for a moment.

If the “person” in each of us — our personality, our sense of humour, our attitudes — is merely the product of chemical and hormonal interactions in our brains and elsewhere in our bodies, and if the skin and flesh we wear is just a meaty outer container for same, then the notion that in becoming depressed or otherwise mentally ill we become a “different person” is meaningless. Indeed, it could almost be argued that things like mental illness and depression are themselves meaningless distinctions, since they are really just a different set of opportunistic reactions.

Any notion that we have an original state of our person must necessarily be accompanied by a tacit implication of something else at work within us, and possibly external to us as well; there is some other frame of reference at work by which we define ourselves, and by which we must define ourselves, that exceeds or transcends the merely physical.

Update: Welcome, WebElf readers!